


Time Stops

by Ferith12



Category: DCU
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-10
Updated: 2016-05-10
Packaged: 2018-06-07 12:46:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6805108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ferith12/pseuds/Ferith12
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dick was eight years old when his world ended.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time Stops

Dick sometimes wonders what the end of the world is like.

 

There are a lot of ideas out there.Maybe it will just slowly, gently die.Maybe something will happen and everything will be gone in an instant.

 

But here’s what Dick thinks, sometimes.  
Some day something horrible will happen.Something terrifying and earth shattering and deadly, and it will happen to every one at once.And in that moment the world will stop, and it just won’t start again.

 

Because that’s what happens when the world ends.When a person’s life and hope and home and love is torn away from them, blows apart, burns.Falls.

 

Dick was eight years old when his world ended. 

 

They were falling.He didn’t know how or why, but they were.That’s when everything stopped.

 

You would think that it would be a mercy that time stopped right then, as they were falling.A chance, maybe to say goodbye, to remember their faces.

 

It wasn’t a mercy.It was fate playing cruel, cruel torture. Because he had no way to reach them, no way to save them, and no way to say goodbye.Because their faces were branded into his heart, burned into his nightmares, terrified, alive, falling, falling, falling.Dead.

 

Because from the first moment they began to fall they were already dead.

 

Time didn’t start again, but it did continue.Slowly, vividly, relentlessly.They fell.But still far too slow, so that a second lasted ages.

 

Dick wanted to scream but he couldn’t.Or maybe he did scream, but he couldn’t tell.Because the only sense he had left in that terrible stillness of time’s death was sight, and all he could see was his family dying. Instant by instant. 

 

The terrible thing was that they didn’t all reach the ground at once.

 

His cousin, Johnny, fell first, and finally he heard something.The crack of bones and a wet sound of blood. 

 

Crack again and his aunt fell.Crimson droplets of blood spraying, sparkling, into the air, and onto the corpse of her son, her hair splayed around her, coming loose from the neat bun it had been restrained in, thick and matted with blood.

 

Crack.His father fell.Bones, eerily white amidst the red, poked out at odd angles from bodies.

 

Thud.His uncle fell directly onto what had been his father, adding blood to the pool of red on the floor of the Big Top.

 

Crack.Somehow, between falling and hitting the bottom, his mother had had time to shed a few tears, shining silver and gold in the brilliant lights of the circus.His mother _never_  cried.

 

Finally he managed to close his eyes and shield himself from the sight of death, of ending.But by now the smell of blood reached him, and he couldn’t escape that.

 

Time began again.People panicked and screamed. People ran around, doing what he had no idea.People talked around and to him.These things existed, and he was cognizant of that, but he was not aware.

 

Life continued, but his life had ended.


End file.
